Content Marketing, Anyone?

If you have been in marketing and advertising for some time now, you will notice that like service, marketing and advertising is not a onetime deal; you have to keep going back into the battlefield and you have to keep winging it till you get lucky. If you thought that you would market your company brilliantly the first time and let your success stories take care of you for the rest of the ride, you thought wrong.

Consumer mind is like a water pipe. What goes in eventually comes out. They will forget about you. They have limitless water molecules to transfer. You can’t get free lunch forever.

What do you do? You keep interacting with them and constantly keep reminding them that you are in the market and you would love to do business with them.

How do you do that? Say hello to content marketing.

Adopting only traditional ways of marketing is not cutting the deal anymore. Merely shooting ad-films and airing them over and over again is no longer sufficient. Besides, ad-films are expensive. What you need is something more concrete; something more direct; something that directly calls for an action; something that pulls at your end user’s strings more effectively.

Coca-Cola greatly supports these marketing techniques. If it works for a multi-billion dollar company like Coca-Cola, it will work for you too. Like I said before, you need to keep coming back to your users with small treats. With technology seeping into every crack in our lives today, making your presence permanent is not going to be difficult at all.

Make it share worthy

Keep a regular flow of content; by content I mean press releases, phone apps, viral videos, ads, blogs, social networking and much more. You have to ensure that all these contents have a connecting link, a strong, common idea, if you will. They should all promote you. That is the reason for their existence.

Merely putting out content is not enough. You should always maintain the quality of your content. Ensure that your content is so good, that it can spread through the online communities like wild-fire. If you can do that on a regular basis, you, dear sir/miss, have arrived. Remember, nobody likes boring, lengthy content. Keep it simple, silly.

Throw in some variety

Innovation is the key to attention. But I’m not asking you to go all the way to town with it. Play it safe too. Coca-Cola, for instance, follows a 70-20-10 approach. 70 percent is safe, easily acceptable, easily creatable, yet interesting content. This section has less chances of blowing up in your face.

20 percent is a moderate risk category, where you derive inspiration from the low risk section and delve deeper. This takes a good amount of time and energy to pull through. This is meant to connect one level deeper with your audience.

The remaining 10 percent is a potential landmine. You bombard your audience with whacked-out, brand new ideas and just hope that it is a hit. Let me tell you, great ideas are made of this stuff. This section is what gives the creators a creative high, a mental dope.

The problem with this is that not too many marketers how to categorise the 70%- 20% and how to go about writing content for the two categories. In the 20percent category, you explore the consumer’s issues in-depth and try and address it through your content. In spite of it being an in-depth piece, make sure you keep it crisp.

The 10%, on the other hand, challenges every fibre of your creativity. It gives your company new ideas for the next big thing. So don’t try to be afraid to try something new.

Make it the best thing of your life

Remember to be your own worst critic. That way, you are bound to come up with award winning stories. There can be no compromise on content excellence because the image of your company will be based on the content you will write.

Be open to ideas from everyone in your organisation. Keeping your ear open to ideas is one of the requirements of a successful marketer. And back the idea with excellent content. There is no way around it. There is no substitution to good content. Without good content, all marketing strategies can be flushed down the drain.